criminal thinking patterns

Criminal thinking patterns

• Criminal acts can be explained by reference to attributions and neutralisations
• young offenders seem to be more likely than non- offenders to interpret ambiguous situations in a hostile way, which could make sense of why they react violently in a situation and get into trouble.
• by using neutralisation offenders can feel justified in their behaviour and so continue to do it

Criminal Thinking Patterns

• Palmer and Hollin (2000) focused on the 'hostile attribution bias'
• an attribution is a way of explaining behaviour, both our own and that of others, in terms of its causes.
• the hostile attribution bias describes ways some people explain behaviour as being hostile to themselves, even when the cause is completely ambiguous.

Criminal thinking patterns

• Palmer and Hollin compared two groups of participants from the Midlands
• The first group was made up of 97 convicted male offenders, aged 13-21 years, whose offences were typically burglary, car theft, joy ride and assult.
• The control group consisted of 77 non- offenders, aged 12-24 years.
• Data was collected using 4 psychometric tests which examined 1. moral reasoning, 2. perceptions of parenting, 3. attributions of intent, 4. self-reported delinquency.
• attribution of intent was assessed by giving the participants 12 short scenarios and then asking them why the protagonist behaved in the way they did, to be nice, to be mean or not sure why. The scenarios could be pro- social (being nice), anti- social (to be horrible), or ambiguous (oyu could not tell from the information in the scenario) There was four of each.

Criminal Thinking Patterns

• The results showed there was a difference in the amount of offending behaviour reported by each group (modal score of 25 for the offending group and 6 for the control group of non- offenders) and that in relation to attribution of intent, the offenders made more hostile attributions of intent when the scenarios were ambiguous.
• These two score correlated strongly.
• Results also showed that the offenders had less mature moral reasoning and perceived both parents as significantly more rejecting than the control group.
• Research showed that young offenders seem more likely than non- offenders to interpret ambiguous situations in a hostile way.

Criminal Thinking Patterns

• the hostile attribution bias, criminals have also been shown to use various neutralisation techniques, which allows criminals deny their actions are wrong or harmful. Neutralisation techniques include 1. denial of responsibility, 2. denial of injury to the victim, 3. denial of victim.
• criminal thinking patterns may explain criminal behaviour in terms of both attributions and neutralisations
• young offenders are more likely than non-offenders to interpret ambiguous situations in a hostile way, which may then explain why they may react violently in a particular situation and get into trouble